Chapter 4: Thinking
77 - Evolutionary Robotics (Part Two)
Those concerns were not allayed by news, the same year, that the roboticist Stuart Wilkinson had created a device named Chew Chew that gets its energy by eating food. Wilkinson, of the University of South Florida in Tampa, equipped his “gastrobot” with microbial fuel cells that digest carbohydrates, converting them to electrical power. He envisions vegetation munchers that run off the lawn grass they clip, or that are programmed as “ecological antibodies” that eat kudzu and other alien species. A parallel effort by a team in England is developing a robot that will feed on garden slugs—a more nutritious form of pest. And once there’s a flesh-eating “slugbot,” some wonder, can a meat eater be far behind?
For those who need still more to worry about, the software engineer Peter Bentley, writing on self-evolving and self-healing software, reports a breaking development in evolvable hardware. “One of the most promising innovations,” he says, “is the modular transformer robot (M-TRAN) built at Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology…It comprises many modules with joints that can stick together in different ways, just like real cells. The robot can dynamically form legs and walk, then rebuild itself and squirm along the ground like a worm. Recent work has used computer evolution to control the robot. There is every chance that the use of developmental process with such hardware could produce the first self-designing, self-building, self-repairing robots within two years.”
In 1950 Isaac Asimov wrote I, Robot, a collection of stories that included “The Three Laws of Robotics”—a guide for how to program robots so they can do us no harm. Over the years his laws became a protective invocation for people concerned about the growing numbers and power of robots. The laws were reassuring in their simplicity:
1—A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2—A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3—A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
But there’s a problem with Asimov’s laws. They are designed to deal with robots that will do what we tell them to—which is contrary to the main thrust of research in artificial intelligence today. “It seems to me,” says Rosalind Picard, reflecting the opinion of most cutting-edge scientists in her field, “that to get really smart machines, you sort of have to let them control themselves.”
Even ten years ago it was becoming clear that big changes are on the way. Speaking at the time, Danny Hillis said, “We’re beginning to depend on computers that use a process very different from engineering, a process that allows us to produce things of much more complexity than we could with normal engineering. Yet we don’t quite understand the possibilities of that process, so in a sense it’s getting ahead of us. We’re now using those programs to make much faster computers so that we will be able to run this process much faster. The process is feeding on itself…We’re analogous to the single-celled organisms when they were turning into multicellular organisms. We’re the amoebas, and we can’t figure out what the hell this thing is that we’re creating.”
It is haughty of us, Hillis said, to think we’re the end product of evolution, and he was not alone. Philosopher Daniel Dennett counseled, “If we are to make further progress in artificial intelligence, we have to give up our awe of living things.” Visionary roboticist Hans Moravec predicted that “by 2040, the robots will be as smart as we are.” Ray Kurzweil, the famed inventor, agreed, as did futurist Vernor Vinge, who said, “Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.” Responding to the many skeptics those pronouncements have aroused, George Dyson, in his book Darwin Among the Machines, replied, “The emergence of life and intelligence from less-alive and less-intelligent components has happened at least once.”
